The liberal pundits who embraced the candidacy of Barack Obama are also eager to issue a death certificate for free market capitalism. They're wrong, and they remind me of what the great Willie Nelson once said: "I'm ragged but I'm right."

To be sure, the American people have handed power over to the Democrats. But today there is a categorical difference between what Republicans stand for and the principles of individual freedom. Parties are all about getting people elected to political office; and the practice of politics too often takes the form of professional juvenile delinquency: short-sighted and self-centered.

This was certainly true of the Bush presidency. Too often the policy agenda was determined by short-sighted political considerations and an abiding fear that the public simply would not understand limited government and expanded individual freedoms. How else do we explain "compassionate conservatism," No Child Left Behind, the Medicare drug benefit and the most dramatic growth in federal spending since LBJ's Great Society?

John McCain has long suffered from philosophical confusions about free markets, and his presidential campaign reflected as much. Most striking was his inability to explain his own health-care proposal, or to defend his tax cuts and tax reform. Ultimately, it took a plumber from Ohio to identify the real nature of Barack Obama's plan to "spread the wealth."

Mr. McCain did find his message on taxes in the last few weeks, but it was too late. A Rasmussen poll of Oct. 30 reported that 31% of likely voters believed that "taxes will go down" under an Obama administration versus just 11% under a McCain administration. Shockingly, 19% of self-described conservatives believed Mr. Obama would cut taxes; only 12% thought Mr. McCain would.

The response by Mr. McCain to the financial crisis on Wall Street was the defining moment of the campaign. In what looked like a tailor-made opportunity to "clean up Washington," the Republican nominee could have challenged the increasingly politicized nature of Federal Reserve policies, and the inherently corrupt relationships between Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and various Democratic committee chairmen. Instead, his reaction was visceral and insecure: He "suspended" his campaign and promised "to put an end to the reckless conduct, corruption, and unbridled greed that have caused a crisis on Wall Street."

In the process, he squandered his political standing with the investor class, a core Republican voting bloc. An October 26-30 Reuters/C-Span/Zogby poll of likely voters showed Mr. McCain barely beating the Democratic nominee among self-identified "investors," 50.4% to 43.8% -- a dramatic drop from the 15-point lead he held in a similar poll a month earlier.

The modern Republican Party has risen above its insecurities to achieve political success. Ronald Reagan, for example, held an unshakably positive vision of American capitalism. He didn't feel a need to qualify the meaning of his conservatism. He understood that big government was cruel and uncaring of individual aspirations. Small government conservatism was, by definition, compassionate -- offering every American a way up to self-determination and economic prosperity.

Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006 because voters no longer saw Republicans as the party of limited government. They have since rejected virtually every opportunity to recapture this identity. But their failure to do so must not be misconstrued as a rejection of principles of individual liberty by the American people. The evidence suggests we are still a nation of pocketbook conservatives most happy when government has enough respect to leave us alone and to mind its own business. The worrisome question is whether either political party understands this.

What will be the fate of free market capitalism in America? Will the 2008 election look more like 1932 -- or 1992?

On both occasions, Republican presidents had abandoned their party's principles for bigger government policies that exacerbated difficult economic times. On both occasions, Democrats took control, largely hijacking the small-government, fiscally responsible rhetoric of their opponents. Of course, FDR's election ushered in the New Deal, the most dramatic expansion of government power in American history, together with policy changes and economic uncertainty that inhibited investment and growth and locked in massive unemployment for nearly a generation.

The official agenda of the incoming administration is not so different from FDR's. Whatever doubts remain about Mr. Obama's governing principles can be cleared up by looking at the governing philosophy of the Democrats in Congress he will be crafting legislation with or the liberal constituencies he is indebted to support. Democrats will not be ambiguous. They have every right to be energized, and will attempt sweeping changes to our economy and the very nature of the relationship between individual American citizens and the federal government.

Their wish list is long. Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has said he would like to redistribute a trillion dollars through the tax code, including massive tax hikes on capital accumulation and individual entrepreneurship. Labor unions want to take away the right of a worker to a secret ballot in organizing elections. Radical environmentalists demand strict curbs on energy production and use. Hillary Clinton may have lost the primary, but expect Democrats to push her favorite idea: government-run heath care.

Will Democratic overreach give the small-government movement the opportunity to reassert itself in the GOP? Former Congressman Dick Gephardt has warned President-elect Obama and the new Democratic majorities to be humble and measured. But with a legislative agenda driven by Nancy Pelosi, George Miller and Mr. Rangel, the temptations may be too great.

In 1992, Republican backbenchers including Newt Gingrich, myself, Bob Walker and John Boehner rose up to challenge the Clinton administration's agenda on taxes, spending and government-run health care. But before we could beat the Democrats, we had to beat the old bulls of our own party who had forgotten their principles and had become very comfortable as a complacent minority. We captured control of Congress in 1994 because we had confidence in our principles, and in the American people's willingness to understand and reward a national vision based on lower taxes, less government and more freedom.

That can happen again today -- but it will require a new generation of leadership, the sooner the better. Rest assured that the American people will show up for the fight.

Mr. Armey, U.S. House majority leader from 1995 to 2002, is chairman of FreedomWorks Foundation.

The modern Republican Party has risen above its insecurities to achieve political success. Ronald Reagan, for example, held an unshakably positive vision of American capitalism. He didn't feel a need to qualify the meaning of his conservatism. He understood that big government was cruel and uncaring of individual aspirations. Small government conservatism was, by definition, compassionate -- offering every American a way up to self-determination and economic prosperity.

Do not every single poll out there show the majority of Americans believe the Democrats are better for the economy?

Total deregulation had led us to the savings and loan fiasco (thanks RR!) and now this.

And again I state the RR led us to the immigration mess we are in.

No mention of that from nonobjective RR lovers.

There will be a never ending fight from the wings of the political spectrum yanking America back and forth.

Real compromise and moderation is always torn by these two extremes.

I really feel like there is no place/party for me to go. I am disgusted by both ends.

I am also disgusted by the rights blaming McCain. Who in there right mind would not agree that the campaign process is not corrupt and yes controlled by special interest groups? I can only hear the libertarians scream over this now.

Why we don't even have any clue where BO got his billion dollars from. Does anyone really think this was from all small donors?

McCain was right about this. But because the Cans held the fund raising advantage (at least in the past) they threw honesty out the window for party politics.

And McCain did come out for regulating Fanny and Freddie. So what was he supposed to do let the market confidence completely crash now and not support the government credit ballout?

I don't want all my savings going to zero.

And people like Coulter who of course blame the loss on McCain. Well who should have been the Can nominee? Romney? He has zero charisma. He would have been wiped even more. McCain is a great American hero. Coulter is a great American embarassment.

Why W was the rights candidate in 2000 and 2004! And W was right to reach out to immigrants and was McCain. Thanks to the greatest living Republican we are left with that mess. And they don't vote for RR's party!That said Latinos sitll voted for crats by over 2 to 1. Can anyone imagine if Romney was in there? It would have been 10 to one.

I am now a reluctant member of the Can party. I simply have no where else to go. Many of these people don't speak for me.

BTW, I like and respect Dick Armey but I disagree with him and think he is to some extent out of touch.

And don't get me wrong. I loved RR. But lets not blindly put him on a pedestal and idolize his (though ok to idolize the man who is great one) policies as though he had all the answers to the world we live in today.

We need *new* ideas. Or at least new applications of his ideas with *real* adjustments to the changing world.

We don't need a simple rehash of Reagonics or Reagan's lets let capitalism and free markets roll as though everything will take care of itself. It obviously doesn't. Yet I certainly lean more towards Reaganomics and away from bomonomics.

We need great thinkers who can adjust what is wrong with Reaganomics and fine tune them. Not simply declare we need to go back to them blindly and stupidly as though they are the answer to all. Lets learn from history not cling to it.

I guess my views are not able to be heard. I would be willing to bet there is a great mass of those who would agree with exactly what I am saying in this country. But all the far right cans are coming out with articles defending the hard themselves and villifying moderates like me.

We should leave Ann Coulter out of this. Like certain leftists her job is to strike a nerve, not rebuild a party. I suggest leaving Reagan out of this too. Admirers like me refer to Reaganomics to selectively cover only the things we liked about Reagan. He was wrong occasionally as CCP points out. I sincerely doubt Reagan would favor porous borders in a post-911 world. McCain favored a form of amnesty. Should he have bucked the right wing and reached further to the Hispanics? Politically it was a no-win either way for McCain in the campaign, not a major issue or distinction from Obama who just wants hope and change. Instead it was a symptom of the fact that he was a maverick not a leader in congress. If his earlier proposals had been better structured, more persuasively argued and better received, maybe we would have these new residents documented and our fences built by now. CCP, aren't you on the (far) right-wing side of this one?

Deregulation hurt S&L's. More specifically you could say that S&Ls existed only because they were propped up by government policies. Would they exist today (No) if they were still prohibited from offering demand deposit accounts (checking, electronic transfers etc.), just updating passbooks and moving stable savings money into 30 year mortgages in the neighborhood? S&Ls had been granted a half point interest advantage over commercial banks by federal law in exchange for staying out of the checking and payments business. Would we have been better off in the 80s if the banks had failed instead of the S&Ls? I don't know, but we didn't deregulate, we changed the regulations. Back to today, did Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac fail due to deregulation? The videos of the congressional regulation oversight committees have been posted here and they say otherwise. All the right questions were asked by the oversight committees and all the wrong answers were given, mostly by those with their hand in the cookie jar. Faulty regulation is not deregulation.

Deregulation and the failure of free markets keeps getting blamed for failure only in our most regulated and least free industries. Nobody is calling for deregulation of federally insured and federally supported institutions.

Now the first appointee from the party not blamed for the crisis comes from the board of Freddie Mac. That is the audacity of hope. Who can compete with that?

Moving forward, I agree with conservative principles laid down by GM, would add peace through strength, but they need to all be specifically applied to the major issues of the day. They also need a spokesman, a podium and an enormous power of persuasion to get heard and considered in an era where nearly all the main media along with their viewers are looking the other direction. The round table style post recently had many interesting ideas.

Conservatives and center-right people need to debate positions and issues BEFORE the election contests and find solutions and consensus. Crafty can offer to host, lol.

If we are lucky, our grandkids will have peace. We are in a multigenerational war for our survival. It doesn't feel like it to most right now, but it's absolutely the case. Survival, then victory through strength, then someday peace through strength.

Doug,Thanks for the thoughtful take. I am happy to leave Coulter out of it. I used to like her but she has lost me.

As for Reagan it is hard to keep him out of it when many conservative journalists, some of them posted here, keep bringing up his name as though he can come back from the dead to save the R party.

I would like to leave him in his rightful place in history within the pantheon of party greats but move on in a forward not backward direction.

As for your point about the immigration thing there is probably a small *majority* of Americans (not only those on the "far right") who want the illegal immigration flood stopped. And I agree with this stance. I want to dispose of old laws that make it ok for people to come here illegally and utilize our hospitals to have babies who are thus legal citizens automatically. Or for those who come here be able to bring 12 or what is it 18 relatives over to live here. I bet more than 50% of Americans would still agree with this.

But!!! I question if it is not *too late* for this because the voting power of the immigrants and particularly the Latino immigrants is now so huge they can make or break national candidates. Look at California, New Mexico, Colorado, and possibly NY and NJ etc.These states have huge Latino voters.

I feel we must be realists. Some including Rove have felt if we get too strict with the Latinos we "will lose them for generations."After seeing the Latino voting polls he appears to be right and that was even after W and McCain taking leniency.

Rove was pointing out how Latinos have conservative values with regards to work ethic and family and religion. While that may be true I see them wanting government sponsored health care and many government programs. If they loved Repub. ideals so much they would vote for that party. But many love the big government the Dems offer.

Thanks for comments back. GM: I agree about requiring victory before peace. Also our strength is not just our arsenal but our will. My recollection of the Iraq war is that 80-90% supported the effort when the Americans appeared to be winning easily and that nearly flipflopped when the war seemed to be going badly. Now it is back to about 50-50 depending on how you ask the question. I don't know why we poll the popularity of war while troops are in harm's way but the results reveal a lack of strength in our resolve that our enemies were happy to expose.

CCP: I don't know to what extent securing borders offends how many Hispanics. You covered the other factors that would have been my reply in the next paragraph. I think the 2/3 that supported Obama related to the class envy / pro-working class message of the campaign. From my point of view that means I think they were sold a false bill of goods since punishing employers doesn't grow jobs or expand middle class wealth. Should we match their proposals or come up with a better false bill of goods. I hope not.

Newt was on the right track earlier this cycle coming up with innovative proposals for the issues of the day. Yhanks for those posts. I disagreed with him on cap and trade but liked most of the ideas and loved the approach. Also, I liked the positive proposal from the recent round table post that indicated we should evaluate our needs and recruit immigrants from around the world. Like Obama did, over the next couple of years we need to change the game, not just re-fight the same battles. (The adventure continues.)

Occasionally Coulter is still funny, but mostly I wouldn't even let her perform fellatio on me.

OTOH IMHO President Reagan remains profoundly relevant on many levels, not least of which is the , , , audacity of believing in free minds, free markets, freedom of choice, freedom of worship, the pursuit of happiness, and America.

Here's this from today's WSJ:

After the shellacking it received at the polls Tuesday, the Republican Party faces a choice. It can put the loss down to the country's fatigue with the Bush Administration and the bad luck of running amid a financial panic and shrug it off. Or it can choose a new direction, with new leadership, and retake the high ground it once occupied, especially on the economy.

Paul RyanThese columns are devoted to ideas, not party, and ordinarily we would not insert ourselves into the internal debate over party leadership. But in the current political and economic climate, it is important that somebody offer an effective argument against the interventionist, antigrowth conventional wisdom that dominates the majority party in Congress. And if the Republican Party would offer that counterargument, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan seems to be the right man to make the case.

Mr. Ryan was first elected in 1998, and he has always won re-election comfortably in a state and a district that are not particularly safe territory for Republicans. Racine County, which represents the biggest piece of Mr. Ryan's district in southeastern Wisconsin, voted for Barack Obama, 53%-46%, but still voted to re-elect Mr. Ryan 62%-37%. He is, in other words, a politician practiced in speaking to and winning over voters who are not necessarily die-hard Republicans.

But the most important reason that Mr. Ryan is the right man at the current moment has nothing to do with electoral calculation. The 38-year-old Mr. Ryan cares about free markets and economic growth and can talk about those subjects in a way that makes sense without falling back on ideology, bromides or oversimplification. He engages these subjects with a vigor that befits his age, and while he has been in Congress for nearly a decade, his is a fresh face on the national scene, one not associated with the bipartisan failures of Congress.

Mr. Ryan is also an effective communicator on television, which will be an important outlet for reaching the American people and presenting an alternative to the economic ideas of Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel. This summer, with a Presidential election well underway and his party in the minority, Mr. Ryan unveiled a far-sighted "Road Map for America's Future."

It is a remarkable document: Other politicians, including Presidential candidates, boldly declare their intentions to push any hard or painful choices off to blue-ribbon commissions. Mr. Ryan's Road Map puts into legislative language not mere general principles, but a plan to pay for all the promises we've made to seniors while preventing government spending from achieving French proportions. "I want to be the Paul Revere of fiscal policy," he said at the time, raising the alarm on our long-term liabilities even while President-elect Obama and others insist that there's nothing to see when it comes to the long-term insolvency of Medicare and Social Security.

More generally, the Republican Party needs a prominent figure who can discuss the full range of economic issues -- growth, the dollar, global trade and monetary policy included. The economy was the top issue on voter minds in this election, and Republicans lost. The party needs someone who can put these issues into a context that voters can understand and relate to. And looking at the national field, there seem precious few candidates for the job.

Mr. Ryan did not solicit our support, and we should note that he said Thursday that he isn't seeking the leadership job. John Boehner, the current leader, wasn't the cause of this year's GOP losses and is the favorite to retain his position. If that's what House Republicans want to do, so be it. Our job is to say what we think in any case. And Mr. Ryan's economic knowledge and youthful energy make him the best choice to pull his party in a more promising direction.

These words bear re-reading-- especially with BO about to give driver licences to illegals, and the vote to anyone with a driver's license:

"As for your point about the immigration thing there is probably a small *majority* of Americans (not only those on the "far right") who want the illegal immigration flood stopped. And I agree with this stance. I want to dispose of old laws that make it ok for people to come here illegally and utilize our hospitals to have babies who are thus legal citizens automatically. Or for those who come here be able to bring 12 or what is it 18 relatives over to live here. I bet more than 50% of Americans would still agree with this.

"But!!! I question if it is not *too late* for this because the voting power of the immigrants and particularly the Latino immigrants is now so huge they can make or break national candidates. Look at California, New Mexico, Colorado, and possibly NY and NJ etc.These states have huge Latino voters.

"I feel we must be realists. Some including Rove have felt if we get too strict with the Latinos we "will lose them for generations."After seeing the Latino voting polls he appears to be right and that was even after W and McCain taking leniency.

"Rove was pointing out how Latinos have conservative values with regards to work ethic and family and religion. While that may be true I see them wanting government sponsored health care and many government programs. If they loved Repub. ideals so much they would vote for that party. But many love the big government the Dems offer."

***These words bear re-reading-- especially with BO about to give driver licences to illegals, and the vote to anyone with a driver's license:***

Crafty,

and....?

I'm all ears.....

What do you prescribe? Lets face it. There is no political will to do anything about the illegals because as Lou Dobbs points out everyday they parites are afraid to lose votes. Each party is ignoring this issue to get Latino votes. The Democrats sold american citizens down the river years ago on this issue to bring in the Spanish who overwhelming vote for them. The Republicans did not or could not stand up to this and W/Rove/et al must have felt it was too late fighting the tide and tried to also kiss up to those who just got here. So they tried, and unfortunately, even that didn't work because the Dems won them over with more promises.

It doesn't help that Romenys own lawn guy was using illegals. Though I think my lawn guy does to. The cans did not seem willing to go after those in this country who employ illegals. And of course it didn't help that it at least in some places it appears to have been made a crime for empolyers to even try to verify citizens status. ("Why this is not a state or local problem" the local governments would scream - its up to the INS to do that).

Now the only party that would have had any will to do anything about it is out of power.

So what do you suggest? I'm all ears because I am disgusted with seeing ever more people who obviously are not here legally all around me (and far from just Latinos - people from Asia, Africa, Europe) just walking in at their leisure and we sit here like dopes doing nothing. All the while the left talks our own country down and now is going to use their prescription for winning over the world's love by ensuring we become a second rate country.

So did Rove et al make a mistake trying to win over the illegals? I don't know. I do know the Dems are happy to sell out US citizens who were born here or who are non citizens here LEGALLY to get and keep power.Could Republicans have secured our border and improved standing among immigrants and Latinos in particular? I guess Doug alluded to that question *I don't know to what extent securing borders offends how many Hispanics.* I would think Rove looked into this and made his conclusions that led to his and W strategy regarding this.

The Death of the American IdeaAn electorate living high off the entitlement hog.

By Mark Steyn

‘Give me liberty or give me death!”

“Live free or die!”

What's that? Oh, don't mind me. I'm just trying out slogans for the 2012 campaign and seeing which one would get the biggest laughs.

My Republican friends are now saying, oh, not to worry, look at the exit polls, this is still a “center-right” country. Americans didn't vote to go left, they voted to go cool. It was a Dancing With The Stars election: Obama's a star and everyone wants to dance with him. It doesn't mean they're suddenly gung-ho for left-wingery.

Up to a point. Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to “go left.” Yet oddly enough that's where they've all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter. Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It's pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up. Doesn't make any difference who controls Congress, who's in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. Every two years, the voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit pollsters that three-quarters of them are “moderates” or “conservatives” (ie, the center and the right) and barely 20 per cent are “liberals.” And then, regardless of how the vote went, big government just resumes its inexorable growth.

“The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

Now who does that remind you of?

Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it's John McCain. He encroached on our liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to stay in “their” homes. And this is the “center-right” candidate? It's hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party's nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That's why Joe the Plumber struck a chord: he briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election back into a two-party choice again.

If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H G Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened. Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Florida to vote for Obama because “I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage.”

While few electorates consciously choose to leap left, a couple more steps every election and eventually societies reach a tipping point. In much of the west, it's government health care. It changes the relationship between state and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie. Henceforth, elections are fought over which party is proposing the shiniest government bauble: If you think President-elect Obama's promise of federally subsidized day care was a relatively peripheral part of his platform, in Canada in the election before last it was the dominant issue. Yet America may be approaching its tipping point even more directly. In political terms, the message of the gazillion-dollar bipartisan bailout was a simple one: “Individual responsibility” and “self-reliance” are for chumps. If Goldman Sachs and AIG and Bear Stearns are getting government checks to “stay in their homes” (and boardrooms, and luxury corporate retreats), why shouldn't Peggy Joseph?

I don't need Barack Obama's help to “spread the wealth around.” I spread my wealth around every time I hire somebody, expand my business, or just go to the general store and buy a quart of milk and loaf of bread. As far as I know, only one bloated plutocrat declines to spread his wealth around, and that's Scrooge McDuck, whose principal activity in Disney cartoons was getting into his little bulldozer and plowing back and forth over a mountain of warehoused gold and silver coins. Don't know where he is these days. On the board at Halliburton, no doubt. But most of the beleaguered band of American capitalists do not warehouse their wealth in McDuck fashion. It's not a choice between hoarding and spreading, but a choice between who spreads it best: an individual free to make his own decisions about investment and spending, or Barney Frank. I don't find that a difficult question to answer. More to the point, put Barney & Co in charge of the spreading, and there'll be a lot less to spread.

I disagree with my fellow conservatives who think the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Frank liberal behemoth will so obviously screw up that they'll be routed in two or four years' time. The President-elect's so-called “tax cut” will absolve 48 per cent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those that are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on the dole. By 2012, it will be more than half, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism, and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the nanny state. That is the death of the American idea — which, after all, began as an economic argument: “No taxation without representation" is a great rallying cry. “No representation without taxation” has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it's unsustainable and you've got to give some of it back?

At that point, America might as well apply for honorary membership in the European Union. It will be a nation at odds with the spirit of its founding, and embarking on decline from which there are few escape routes. In 2012, the least we deserve is a choice between the collectivist assumptions of the Democrats, and a candidate who stands for individual liberty — for economic dynamism not the sclerotic “managed capitalism” of Germany; for the First Amendment, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they're photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business. In Forbes this week, Claudia Rosett issued a stirring defense of individual liberty. That it should require a stirring defense at all is a melancholy reflection on this election season. Live free — or die from a thousand beguiling caresses of nanny-state sirens.

We Blew It A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered. by P.J. O'Rourke 11/17/2008, Volume 014, Issue 09

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the "rich," and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn't zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.

In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states' rights. But he was dead wrong. Separate isn't equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.

Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The "Southern Strategy" was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon--not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn't needed. Southern whites were on--begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury--an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There's a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.

"I've got six sons," the farmer says.

"Are they all good little Democrats?" the candidate asks.

"Well," the farmer says, "five of 'em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin'??.??.??.??"

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn't even deliver on Eleanor's promises.

It's not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren't so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)

Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it. There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers. When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia. And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their liberal nonsense stops at the ankles.

We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell "Amen." If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. "Here," she said, "is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What's the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he's hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens." But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn't see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.

We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens," continue their charity without stint.

The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one grampa grew up on.

A "farm" today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall. If we cared anything about "nutrition" we would--to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans--stop growing all food immediately. And "bioenergy" is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President Bush. Now it's going to cost us at least $285 billion. That's about five times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq. For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.

Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we're tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration??.??.??.??)

Anyway, a low tax rate is not--never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician--a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, "We can lower your taxes." Conservatives should say to voters, "You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

"We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation's culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

"We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone's pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people's pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

"And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out."

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we'd be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn't land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry's freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

But are we men and women of principle? And I don't mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don't get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we're talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism.

Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years--from 1954 to 1994--to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we managed it in just 12. (Who says Republicans don't have much on the ball?)

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)

To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?

We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it's been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn't have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You'd urge your daughter to date Rosie O'Donnell before you'd put troops ashore in such a place.

Since the early 1980s I've been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we'd forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we've been doing of that lately.)

If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we'll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.

And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial crisis. For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average Americans to act like "stakeholders" in their economy. They learned. They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.

Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's statement: "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.'?" Ask a Katrina survivor.

The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.

Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.

Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, "How can we make a buck off this?" The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide enough variety of lousy mortgages--some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from McMansions--bundle them together and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a "collateralized debt obligation" with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn't.

Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the "room full of horse s--" trick. Brokerages were saying, "We're going to sell you a room full of horse s--. And with that much horse s--, you just know there's a pony in there somewhere."

Anyway, it's no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don't want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.

Although I must say we're doing good work on our final task--attaching the garden hose to our car's exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

Barack Obama won the White House by campaigning against an unpopular incumbent in a time of economic anxiety and lingering foreign policy concerns. He offered voters an upbeat message, praised the nation as a land of opportunity, promised tax cuts to just about everyone, and overcame doubts about his experience with a strong performance in the presidential debates.

Does this sound familiar? It should. Mr. Obama followed the approach that worked for Ronald Reagan. His victory confirmed that voters still embrace the guiding beliefs of the Reagan era.

During Reagan's campaign, the nation suffered from high unemployment and high inflation. This time around, data from the Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll showed that Mr. Obama took command of the race during the 10 days following the collapse of Lehman Brothers -- when the Wall Street meltdown hit Main Street. Before that event John McCain was leading nationally by three percentage points. Ten days later Mr. Obama was up by five and never relinquished his lead.

Mr. Obama's tax-cutting message played a key role in this period of economic anxiety. Tax cuts are well-received at such times: 55% of voters believe they are good for the economy. Only 19% disagree and see them as bad policy.

Down the campaign homestretch, Mr. Obama's tax-cutting promise became his clearest policy position. Eventually he stole the tax issue from the Republicans. Heading into the election, 31% of voters thought that a President Obama would cut their taxes. Only 11% expected a tax cut from a McCain administration.

The last Democratic candidate to win the tax issue was also the last Democratic president -- Bill Clinton. In fact, the candidate who most credibly promises the lowest level of taxes has won every presidential election in at least the last 40 years.

But while Mr. Obama was promising to cut taxes, the Bush administration took the lead on a $700 billion, taxpayer-backed bailout bill -- with very little marketing finesse. Few Americans supported the bailout, and a majority of voters were more concerned that the government would do too much rather than too little. In terms of getting the economy going again, 58% said that more tax cuts would better stimulate the economy than new government spending.

A Rasmussen survey conducted Oct. 2 found that 59% agreed with the sentiment expressed by Reagan in his first inaugural address: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Just 28% disagreed with this sentiment. That survey also found that 44% of Obama voters agreed with Reagan's assessment (40% did not). And McCain voters overwhelmingly supported the Gipper.

The real challenge for the new president will be attempting to govern with a message that resonates with most voters but divides his own party. Consider that 43% of voters view it as a positive to describe a candidate as being like Reagan, while just 26% consider it a negative. Being compared to Reagan rates higher among voters than being called "conservative," "moderate," "liberal" or "progressive." Except among Democrats, that is. Fifty-one percent of Democrats view that Reagan comparison as a negative. There's Mr. Obama's dilemma in a nutshell.

Mr. Obama won the White House promising tax cuts, but he will be governing with a Democratic Congress bursting with desire for a more activist government. As he faces this challenge, he might remember the fate of another man who made taxes the central part of his campaign: the first President Bush, whose most memorable campaign line -- "Read my lips, no new taxes" -- was as central to his victory as Mr. Obama's promise to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. George H.W. Bush famously reneged on that promise. Voters rejected his bid for a second term.

Mr. Obama ran like Reagan. Will he be able to govern that way, too?

Mr. Rasmussen is president of Rasmussen Reports, an independent national polling company.

***Mr. Obama ran like Reagan. Will he be able to govern that way, too?***

Oh comon. What spin. He ran the opposite of Reagan. First of all Reagan didn't want tax "cuts" to be only for certain chosen segment of the population nor did he expect that the other segments would be the ones to pay for them.

Reaganomics is trickle down and Bomonomics is build from the *bottom* and let it work up.

Fair enough-- but I think the point here is that if BO had not dramatically and glibly shifted his tax positions during the campaign (and had McC not been so imcompetent as to let him get away with it) to where he was successfully pretending to be a tax cutter, McC would have won.

The larger point is that tax cuts, a key strand of Reaganism, remain quite popular across the political spectrum.

***The larger point is that tax cuts, a key strand of Reaganism, remain quite popular across the political spectrum***True andBO did disingeniusly steal Rep thunder with the rant about reducing taxes on 95%.

Commentary: GOP should ask why U.S. is on the wrong trackSTORY HIGHLIGHTSRon Paul: Asking about the future of the GOP is the wrong questionPaul says instead people should ask why the country went in the wrong directionRepublicans stopped being the party of limited government, Paul saysPaul says it will take time for GOP to return to its traditional valuesNext Article in Politics »

By Ron PaulSpecial to CNN

Editor's note: Ron Paul is a Republican congressman from Texas who ran for his party's nomination for president this year. He served in Congress in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was elected again to Congress in 1996, serving continuously since then. Rep. Paul is a member of the House Financial Services Committee.

Ron Paul says the nation is off track and Republicans have to rediscover their core beliefs.

(CNN) -- The questions now being asked are: Where to go from here and who's to blame for the downfall of the Republican Party?

Too bad the concern for the future of the Republican Party had not been seriously addressed in the year 2000 when the Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and the Presidency.

Now, in light of the election, many are asking: What is the future of the Republican Party?

But that is the wrong question. The proper question should be: Where is our country heading? There's no doubt that a large majority of Americans believe we're on the wrong track. That's why the candidate demanding "change" won the election. It mattered not that the change offered was no change at all, only a change in the engineer of a runaway train.

Once it's figured out what is fundamentally wrong with our political and economic system, solutions can be offered. If the Republican Party can grasp hold of the policy changes needed, then the party can be rebuilt.

In the rise and fall of the recent Republican reign of power these past decades, the goal of the party had grown to be only that of gaining and maintaining power -- with total sacrifice of the original Republican belief in shrinking the size of government.

Don't MissGov. Sanford: Conservatives didn't lose election, GOP didFrist: Good to have former senators in chargeIn Depth: CommentariesMost Republicans endorsed this view in order to achieve victories at the polls. Limiting government power and size with less spending and a balanced budget as the goal used to be a "traditional" Republican value. This is what Goldwater and Reagan talked about. That is what the Contract with America stood for.

The opportunity finally came in 2000 to do something about the cancerous growth of government. This clear message led to the Republican success at the polls.

Once the Republicans were in power, though, the promises faded, and all policies were directed at maintaining or increasing power by trying to whittle away at Democratic strength by acting like big-spending Democrats.

The Republican Congress never once stood up against the Bush/Rove machine that demanded support for unconstitutional wars, attacks on civil liberties here at home, and an economic policy based on more spending, more debt, and more inflation -- while constantly preaching the flawed doctrine that deficits don't matter as long as taxes aren't raised.

But what the Republican leadership didn't realize was that ALL spending is a tax on middle-class Americans through price inflation and that eventually the inevitable consequence is paying for the extravagance with a financial crisis.

Party leaders concentrated only on political tricks in order to maintain power and neglected the limited-government principles on which they were elected. The only solution for this is for Republicans to once again reassess their core beliefs and show how the country (not the party) can be put back on the right track. The problem, though, is regaining credibility.

After eight years of perpetual (and unnecessary and unconstitutional) war, persistent and expanded attacks on our privacy, runaway deficits, and now nationalization of the financial system, Republicans are going to have a tough time regaining the confidence of the American people. But that's what must be done.

Otherwise, Republicans can only mimic Democrats and hope for an isolated victory here and there. And that's just more of the same that brought on the disintegration of the party.

Since the new alignment of political power offers no real change, we will remain on the same track without even a pretense of slowing the growth of government. With the new administration we can expect things to go from bad to worse.

Opportunity abounds for anyone who can present the case for common sense in fiscal affairs, for protection of civil liberties here at home, and avoiding the senseless foreign entanglements which have bogged us down for decades and contributed so significantly to our fiscal and budgetary crisis.

During the debates in the Republican Presidential primary, even though I am a 10-term sitting Representative Member of Congress, I was challenged more than once on my Republican credentials. The fact that I was repeatedly asked how I could be a Republican when I was talking a different language than the other candidates answers the question of how the Republican Party can slip so far so fast.

My rhetorical answer at the time was simple: Why should one be excluded from the Republican Party for believing and always voting for:

• Limited government power

• A balanced budget

• Personal liberty

• Strict adherence to the Constitution

• Sound money

• A strong defense while avoiding all undeclared wars

• No nation-building and no policing the world

How can a party that still pretends to be the party of limited government distance itself outright from these views and expect to maintain credibility? Since the credibility of the Republican Party has now been lost, how can it regain credibility without embracing these views, or at least showing respect for them?

I concluded my answer by simply stating the Republican Party had lost its way and must reassess its values. And that is what needs to be done in a hurry.

But it might just take a new crop of leaders to regain the credibility needed to redirect the Party. It certainly won't be done overnight. It took a long time to come out of the wilderness after 40 years of Democratic rule for the Republican Party to take charge. Today though, time moves more quickly. Opportunities will arise. The one thing for certain is that in the next four years we will not see the Republic restored. Instead the need for it will be greater than ever.

The problems are easily understood and the answers are not that difficult. Abusing the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution can be reversed. If the Republican Party can grasp hold of the needed reforms, it can lead the way and regain its credibility. If power is sought for power's sake alone, the Party will never be able to wrench away the power of the opposition.

In the past two years, I found that when the young people heard the message of liberty, they overwhelmingly responded favorably, fully realizing the failure of the status quo and the need to once again endorse a system of self reliance, personal responsibility, sound money, and a non-interventionist foreign policy while rejecting the cradle-to-grave nanny state all based on the rule of law and the Constitution.

To ignore the political struggle and only "hope for the best" is pure folly. The march toward a dictatorial powerful state is now in double time.

All those who care -- and especially those who understand the stakes involved -- have an ominous responsibility to energetically get involved in the battle of survival for a free and prosperous America.

I think one of the key variables is how the Fed has printed too much money and has kept interest rates too low ((ROI should be greater than inflation + taxes). Too much money at too low a price has been sloshing around the global system. Conservatives (and Republicans) need to understand this and communicate this.

I get that too many US dollars translate to a loss in the value of the currency, but I'm not sure I grasp every element of the impact that makes on our economy, aside from the "wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread" from 1920's Germany scenario.

Briefly (and this is a huge subject!) deflating a currency has several consequences. Off the top of my head here are some of them in no particular order:

1) Amongst the most important is the misallocation of investment capital. This is a matter of HUGE importance-- for example too many homes get built. This leads to a bubble, which when it bursts creates calamity and tragedy-- (and the free market gets blamed )

2) Savers get screwed. For example, they save what should be enough for old age, then the government comes along and decimates the values of their savings leaving them with a much harder old age-- this then makes them more dependent upon the government;

3) With negative interest rates (inflation + taxes being greater than the interest rate) people are penalized for saving. This leads to one or both of two behaviors: First-- less saving and Second-- riskier investments as savers/investors seek to outrun the dimunition of their savings through inflation and taxes. We see both of these behaviors in abundance on the American landscape.

4) A devaluing currency. Because of the unique role of the dollar in the world economy (i.e. we are the main currency of international transactions) this has profound consequences for the world economy. What happens is that when the dollar depreciates, other countries often feel that this then creates a price advantage for our products on the international market. So other countries print more money too so as to maintain stable exchange rates. This was a major variable in the creation and the maintainence of the Great Depression. These were known as "beggar thy neighbor" devaluations i.e. by devlaing my currency, my country's products become cheaper and my people make the sales and your people do not. The net result is that everyone tries to devalue which means simply that too much money is created and a world-wide inflation is unleashed. We just saw this in the commodity bubbles (including oil) and the housing bubbles world-wide. When the bubble bursts (and it always will) the consequences are terrible--e.g. the current meltdown and often lead those who created the problem blaming the market and panicing people into giving them power to control and manipulate the market even more!!!

In the wake of Clubber Lang's vicious defeat of Philadelphia's favorite son in Rocky III, the Italian Stallion reflected back on why he lost. It seemed he had everything going for him—but then he got caught up in his own glory. When Rocky finally hit bottom, his former nemesis, Apollo Creed, dramatically stepped in to offer some stock speech wisdom: "When we fought, you had that eye of the tiger, man, the edge! And now you gotta get it back, and the way to get it back is go back to the beginning."

Today's Republicans are in similar spot. After Barack Obama's massive win, they've been reviewing the fight tapes, only to discover that getting caught up in the glow of their own power eventually led to their downfall. They should've gotten the message in 2006, but this November's spectacular defeat (save Ted "Marion Barry" Stevens) has finally woken them up. Now the question is: What direction will the Republican Party take? Will the GOP "return" to some dogma of the past? Reaganomics would appease many in the Old Party "old guard" who think like Apollo Creed. Or will the party invoke Teddy Roosevelt's progressivism and shift more to the political center? These are the two options currently being debated by pundits on all sides, but the fact is that either option would spell doom for Republicans.

Consider David Brooks' most recent column in the New York Times, where he outlines what he sees as the GOP dividing into two warring camps now that they've been thoroughly defeated. It's the Traditionalists versus the Reformers. Reagan versus Teddy. Old Party power versus moderate centrism. But in reading Brooks' analysis, one is left wondering if there isn't another direction the GOP could head in order to return to power.

Brooks defines the "Traditionalists" as those who believe "the G.O.P. should return to its core ideas: Cut government, cut taxes, restrict immigration. Rally behind Sarah Palin." He puts Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Grover Norquist, and organizations such as the Federalist Society and Family Research Council into this camp.

Palin, Limbaugh, and Hannity truly do belong in the same wing of the GOP, the branch that has rejected intellectualism in favor of dogma, the group that believes passionate devotion to the "real America" will energize a Nietzschian-like will to power. Unfortunately, Brooks identifies this group as the defenders of the free market. That's not a reassuring thought for those who favor both free markets and free minds.

The second group Brooks sees the GOP splintering into is the "Reformers." This group tends to believe that "American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government. Reformers propose new policies to address inequality and middle-class economic anxiety. They tend to take global warming seriously. They tend to be intrigued by the way David Cameron has modernized the British Conservative Party."

Brooks puts authors David Frum (Comeback), Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam (Grand New Party), Ramesh Ponnuru, and Peggy Noonan into this group—as well as himself, proving that his neocon spine has cat-like flexibility. These Republicans believe in John McCain's mission to take the party towards the center with the rest of the country—though most were critical of his methods during the campaign.

Given the Brooks analysis, here's the real problem for the Republicans: The Traditionalist defenders of capitalism wind up out of touch with America and grounded in rhetoric rather than political principle. Meanwhile, Reformers who want to "appeal more to Hispanics, independents and younger voters" have to abandon the small government model and become the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

None of that spells long term success for Republicans. What the GOP needs are libertarians, those who believe not only in small government, but also in individualism and the truly liberating power of free markets. If the Ron Paul movement tells us anything, it's that the Republican Party can be more than a party of old white guys with bad hair cuts.

Brooks believes that the Traditionalist will win in the short term—led in 2012 by Sarah Palin—but that Reformers will win out in the end as the GOP continues to lose. He argues that once the GOP suffers more defeats, the Reformers "will build new institutions, new structures and new ideas, and the cycle of conservative ascendance will begin again."

Again, it's doubtful that Brooks' vision of a reformed, moderate Republican Party will be able to differentiate itself from a lukewarm Democratic Party. But even if they were to rise to power, it wouldn't be the small government, Goldwater-style GOP of old. It would simply be a new kind of party.

What does this mean for the future of free market economics? Perhaps today's libertarians will learn first hand the pain of Hayek, Friedman, Mises, and the rest at Mont Pelerin who had to confront a world that adversely opposed their ideas.

But perhaps not.

A new conservative movement that takes libertarian ideas seriously could use the inertia created by the nation's new progressivism to slingshot itself into the future on a platform of reduced government, lower taxes, and limited interventionism, while also respecting climate change (adjusting the tax code to encourage green reform without any expense to taxpayers) and reforming the immigration system (opening the borders as the market demands labor without sacrificing security).

The Republican Party has a chance to transform itself into something it has never been: a party of small government based on classical liberal principles. It doesn't have to be one of David Brooks' visions of the GOP. In fact, if the Republican Party wants to return to power it will recognize the flaws in both approaches, avoid them like Road Runner toying with Wile E. Coyote, and embrace libertarianism instead.

South Carolina's Mark Sanford is one of three GOP governors now being widely mentioned as potential saviors of the Republican Party between now and 2012. All are conspicuous for calling on their own party to live up to its principles. Most notably, none have advocated the GOP move to the left.

Mr. Sanford is a two-term governor known for vetoing spending bills, pushing market-oriented policy reforms (such as moving his state's Medicaid system to a private account-based model) and criticizing the lapses of the national GOP. "Some on the left will say our electoral losses are a repudiation of our principles of lower taxes, smaller government and individual liberty," he wrote on CNN.com after this month's elections. "But Tuesday was not in fact a rejection of those principles -- it was a rejection of Republicans' failure to live up to those principles."

In the same op-ed he took a swing at Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, identifying him as someone who "personifies what went wrong in the election. . . He was a proud champion of pork barrel spending and bridges to nowhere and stayed so long that he developed a blind eye to ethical lapses that would be readily seen by scout leaders and soccer moms alike."

Two other leading lights for a troubled GOP are Govs. Sarah Palin of Alaska and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. Before she became John McCain's running mate, Mrs. Palin was best known for challenging her own state GOP to cure its spendthrift, corrupt ways. She unseated a sitting mayor in her first bid for office and became a giant killer by knocking off the high-handed, free-spending Gov. Frank Murkowski in a Republican primary.

Mr. Jindal is a boy wonder of the party. At 25, he was appointed to fix Louisiana's failing Medicaid program, and succeeded. At 32, he lost a hard-fought campaign for governor but later landed a Congressional seat from which he criticized bureaucratic bungling in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Last year, after Katrina had destroyed Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco's reputation, he won his second bid for the office by promising sweeping reform of Louisiana's corrupt and inefficient government culture.

That Republicans are coalescing around these three governors is also revealing for who is not included. Several years ago Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and EPA administrator, wrote a book called "It's My Party Too." She used that treatise to argue for the party to abandon its conservative roots. Even after two serious GOP drubbings at the polls, she has found no takers. Likewise, Lincoln Chaffee, the former Rhode Island Senator once labeled a "Republican in Name Only," was still complaining last week to the Washington Post that "right-wing talk show hosts and the Ann Coulters and that ilk" never understood that the GOP needs people like him.

Maybe that's because Republicans have looked closely at the election results. The country hasn't so much moved left as it has abandoned a GOP that abandoned its own principles. In Ohio, Barack Obama actually won about 40,000 fewer votes than John Kerry did four years ago. Mr. Obama took Ohio only because John McCain pulled 350,000 fewer votes than George W. Bush did in 2004. Republicans and Republican-leaning voters stayed home.

That's not an endorsement of the ideas of the left. It's a lack enthusiasm for a party that failed to deliver the smaller government it promised in Washington. At least the GOP, in settling on future leaders like Governors Jindal, Sanford and Palin, seems to understand that.

Reposted from another thread that was essentially of duplicate of this thread.

Future? of Republican party « on: November 15, 2008, 08:06:02 AM »

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------I agree with some of the following though not all. I think he is right on target at the Republican party's banckrupcy in ideas and inability to adapt. Falling to the position that the reason for the failure of the party is due to its diverting from its core principles is hopefully not going to win out the minds of what is left of the leadership and dircection of the party and dooming it to further defeat. If Shawn Hannity and Rush are going to lead this party than whomever follows them goes the way of the pied piper.If anyone questions the barren thoughtfulness of the party just witness that some in the party think that putting Palin at the forefront and labelling her a leader of the party is a good idea. Anyone who now thinks this woman can attract anyone new to the right is dreaming. She is turning into a total mindless cad inmo. I am surely dissappointed and becoming quite embarassed by her.I was wrong to think she has her own wisdom or ability to engage in real insightful conversation.

I really thought she would go back to Alaska, perhaps get Steven's Senate seat, or run for the Senate or Congress later and re-establish herself with more gravitas. And if she would then spend the next couple years really LEARNING the issues so she could speak with some authority, sensibility, and logic rather than just run around with some by-gone party slogans. Again I over-estimated her (or if I try to be kind - her "handlers"). The cans are relying on governors. I guess because they are out of power they no longer have the floor to speak their views and establish themselves with cabinet posts, chairmanship seats, etc.

We need another Newt to rise from the Democratic controlled houses to lead the party back. Why can't/won't Newt run again?Amzing thing to see how our liberal University system honors a person like Ayers but despises a person like Newt.

***Ship of foolsNov 13th 2008From The Economist print edition

Political parties die from the head down

Illustration by KALJOHN STUART MILL once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who have been busy reinventing conservatism for a new era. As Lexington sees it, the title of the “stupid party” now belongs to the Tories’ transatlantic cousins, the Republicans.

There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.

The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.

The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.

Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.

This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.

Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.

Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.

Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.

Time for reflectionHow likely is it that the Republican Party will come to its senses? There are glimmers of hope. Business conservatives worry that the party has lost the business vote. Moderates complain that the Republicans are becoming the party of “white-trash pride”. Anonymous McCain aides complain that Mrs Palin was a campaign-destroying “whack job”. One of the most encouraging signs is the support for giving the chairmanship of the Republican Party to John Sununu, a sensible and clever man who has the added advantage of coming from the north-east (he lost his New Hampshire Senate seat on November 4th).

But the odds in favour of an imminent renaissance look long. Many conservatives continue to think they lost because they were not conservative or populist enough—Mr McCain, after all, was an amnesty-loving green who refused to make an issue out of Mr Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright. Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled “Ideas have Consequences”; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.***

One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal.

This quote strikes me as especially important in regards to the party's future.

There was a time when the power of the "intelligentsia" (for lack of a better word) was incredibly important to the evolution of the conservative movement. Sadly, intelligence has somehow become a bad word. There was a time when sending your kids to college was actually something to be proud of regardless of political affiliation. Unfortunately many in the political realm have equated intelligence/book learning/a degree with being elitist or out of touch with the main stream.

The Economist article points to many examples of this dumbing down, but doesn't ask an important question:

How do you evolve a political movement which for the past few years has placed negative connotations on college education/book smarts? How does one turn the smart folks bad, regular folks good equation around (or at least balance the equation)?

(Butting in here), if I understand the conversation correctly, there was a request for examples of "leftist indoctrination mills" in higher education. Maybe the most obvious example IMO would be the presentation of the anthropogenic global warming theory without also presenting obvious holes and flaws in the theory. Millions and millions of children I believe have been either shown directly the Al Gore movie, from elementary school to PhD, while few have been taught about the revisions and corrections to the selected data presented. Almost none of the children are taught about the plethora of other interest facts (Arctic ocean level falling, for example) that would lead one to at least partially doubt the alarmist conclusions implied by the warminig view - that a major portion of the United States will be lost to the ocean levels in this century, for example, and that temperatures can only accelerate upward and man is the cause even though temps haven't gone up in ten years.

Besides Al Gore's movie, examples of unbalanced reporting comes from sources as trusted as Weekly Reader, Scientific American and of course the NY Times.

After consistently teaching 'an inconvenient hypothesis' as truth and fact and testing on the fundamentals of human caused warming, then we poll young voters on the topic and are surprised and impressed by the degree of 'consensus'.

Another area would be the widespread focus in higher education on flaws in the free enterprise-based, capitalistic system without the context of also teaching the amazing mechanics and merits of the system.

Would you agree and can others add more examples...

Obvious solution to climate change indoctrination is to have all who are taught the theory to be also taught the view of the most prominent skeptics, that anthropogenic causes are likely a minor part, that the data is inconsistent and that many other factors are still largely not well understood.

Solution for economic teaching is to require the teaching of our economic system to all children with all its successes before teaching its flaws, shortcomings and the alternative systems with their own strengths and weaknesses.

I've certainly had a hard time finding historically accurate information about the Second Amendment and it's genesis at various colleges, and my kids are certainly not getting accurate info about it in elementary school. AGW, on the other hand is all over the place; I've had a couple interesting conversations with teachers after my kids relay that dad says AGW is unmitigated foolishness.

Don't need examples of "indoctrination mills". Actually, I find the use of the term not only an over-generalization, but insulting to the intelligence of the individuals that teach/work/attend them. I mean, do you really think that the great majority of this nation's youth is lock stepping to some type of liberal educational agenda? If so, you are veering into paranoid conspiracy territory.

And yes, a "rejection of leftist indoctrination mills that masquerade as institutes of higher education" is a direct attack on education. Especially when you present no alternatives. I'm asking for alternatives to college and university. So give me some.

DMcG, your solution of fair and balanced education looks suspiciously like a 'fairness doctrine' type of equation. Let each subject that is taught be examined equally from both sides, right? So who decides the equal balance? A government entity? The school board? The parents? I find a ton of problems with the state of education across the board, and d*mn if I can think of a solution.

I'll cut it here 'cuz I'm veering way off the thread subject. But please, give me some realistic alternatives or suggestions to what some view as "indoctrination".

Back to my question:

How do you evolve a political movement which for the past few years has placed negative connotations on college education/book smarts? How does one turn the smart folks bad, regular folks good equation around (or at least balance the equation)?

"A rejection of the leftist indoctrination mills that masquerade as schools of higher education does not equate to a rejection of education"

Funny, I hear that a lot and yet no one ever presents alternatives or solutions. I know you can give me some GM, so please do.

Solutions: The social sciences need to return to the scientific model and reject political correctness and the "Ward Churchillization" of academia. It should be a search for truth and a venue for exchanging ideas rather than imparting post-modern, queer theory talking points while engaging in a stalinesque suppression of dissenting ideas.

The traditional campus and undergrad/postgrad paradigm need to be scrapped. Smaller segments of education that stand alone, or that can be coupled with other segments to reach a more advanced degree, while the student works is much more useful and practical.

The virtual campus/distance learning should be the rule and not the exception. This could be used for greater transparency of who is actually teaching and what is being taught. Much like teaching martial arts, let those that excel be recognized and rewarded rather than labor under a brand name like Stanford or UCLA.

Don't need examples of "indoctrination mills". Actually, I find the use of the term not only an over-generalization, but insulting to the intelligence of the individuals that teach/work/attend them. I mean, do you really think that the great majority of this nation's youth is lock stepping to some type of liberal educational agenda? If so, you are veering into paranoid conspiracy territory.

**The is a ton of documentation that would support those criticisms of academia. I can cite my own experiences as well.**

And yes, a "rejection of leftist indoctrination mills that masquerade as institutes of higher education" is a direct attack on education. Especially when you present no alternatives. I'm asking for alternatives to college and university. So give me some.

**See my comments above. The current model is wasteful, inefficient and does not serve the taxpayers, the students or the society at large.**

DMcG, your solution of fair and balanced education looks suspiciously like a 'fairness doctrine' type of equation. Let each subject that is taught be examined equally from both sides, right? So who decides the equal balance? A government entity? The school board? The parents? I find a ton of problems with the state of education across the board, and d*mn if I can think of a solution.

**If a school takes any state or federal money, then they had better be ready to meet some standards that demonstrate that the school isn't just teaching only how evil America, western civilization and any random heteosexual white male is.**

I'll cut it here 'cuz I'm veering way off the thread subject. But please, give me some realistic alternatives or suggestions to what some view as "indoctrination".

Back to my question:

How do you evolve a political movement which for the past few years has placed negative connotations on college education/book smarts? How does one turn the smart folks bad, regular folks good equation around (or at least balance the equation)?**If you are a student of history, you can recognize that our president-elect is getting ready to take our economy over the cliff. As most people have bought into "hopandchange", not realizing it translates to socialism, they'll have to learn the hard way. Post-disaster, a good candidate can then stand up to help fix the mess. Funny enough, lots of NPR fans that fancy themselves intelligent and educated know nothing about anything, like basic economics. This allows them to vote "hopeandchange".**

I mean, do you really think that the great majority of this nation's youth is lock stepping to some type of liberal educational agenda? If so, you are veering into paranoid conspiracy territory.

Is that a fact? Guess you've never dealt with any of the "green" gibberish being pounded into kids' heads these days. Recycling by about any empiric measure is a grossly ineffective tactic that for the most part leads to sorted piles of trash heading to the landfill instead of unsorted piles of trash doing the same. The underlying cause of the recycling effort would be done a hell of a lot of good if some entrepreneur came along and created markets for recycled material, but what's being taught from kindergarten to grad school in just about every school in the nation, sort your trash into piles that end up in the same place, or find economically productive means of using recycled material? I've rarely seen the latter while the former is epidemic, IMO because members of the nanny state left figure if they can get you feeling guilty enough to muck around in your trash can from elementary school on they are well on their way to getting you to feel guilty enough about everything else to dictate other odious, counterproductive responses.

As mentioned above, the Second Amendment is another case in point. It's not like their isn't copious source material demonstrating the Second Amendment means what it says, and it's not like there aren't leftist in possession of intellectual rigor who haven't, often times reluctantly, come out and said the framers clearly intended US citizens an individual right to keep and bear arms, but try to find those facts in any curriculum in America. My kids are regularly chastised for relaying historical truth with no veering into paranoid territory required. Think on that for a minute: kids contending with opprobrium at school because they spoke accurately. And that's 'sposed to be trumped by the concern that the folks who are force feeding falsehoods might feel insulted when their methods are called out? Which is the bath water and where is the baby?

The solution is simple: intellectual rigor, but that's getting pretty hard to find in the current everybody-who-competes-gets-a-trophy climate. If "save the planet," or "don't hurt anyone's feelings," or "regurgitate this reflexively" are the educational ends then yes, muddleheaded lockstep is a common result. If, on the other hand, the ability to marshal evidence, speak of it cogently, document sources, analyze them effectively, respond incisively to critcism and so is the educational end, then level headed thinking results.

Indeed, the best class I ever took was taught by Roger Wilkins, a very left wing professor who won a Pulitzer for writing the Washington Post editorials that helped drum Nixon out of office. The first day of class he said something like "I am an unapologetic liberal and believe the left wing democratic ideals are what this country needs most." I remember thinking "oh fornication, here we go again: I'll take on some left wing fruit loop on his own ground and end up with another 'C.'"

Didn't happen; Roger respects rigor above all else and favors well framed argument he disagrees with over fuzzy headed gibberish favoring his side of the aisle. He got my libertarian number quickly and used me as a foil as needed. Many a class would start with Roger saying something like "Guinness, let's here what you think about affirmative action," and then it would be on from there. I spent many an office hour debating things further with him, took every course he offered, earned an "A" in them all and was used as the example when students complained he never gave high grades, helped him with his research, and, when he'd be called out of town suddenly, was the guy he'd ask to help with his classes in his absence. I learned a hell of a lot from the guy, and respect the hell out of him for showing me just how effective rigor embedded in the lesson plan can be. As such I'm further all sorts of annoyed that I had to spend so much far less productive time in classrooms with baton wavers who'd get wounded and snarky if you didn't join their parade.

Bottom line: there's no need to present alternative forms of education if rigor is introduced early and throughout the curriculum. Alas these days concepts of PC epistemological purity seems to be the driving force.

"DMcG, your solution of fair and balanced education looks suspiciously like a 'fairness doctrine' type of equation. Let each subject that is taught be examined equally from both sides, right? So who decides the equal balance? A government entity? The school board? The parents? I find a ton of problems with the state of education across the board, and d*mn if I can think of a solution."

SB, I agree with you and did NOT mean to imply a government solution. Institutions filled with indoctrination will face the wrath of me whining on this board, not a federal balance enforcement board. School choice is one solution. but often the choices look a lot alike. Entrepreneurs and capitalists don't generally go into teaching. K-12 is largely a creature of the teacher's unions unless parents, voters, school boards or legislators speak out and they rarely do.

Schools were loaded with bias in the 1970s too but many kids grew up and voted for Reagan. Kids eventually can smell BS it just takes some time to sort things out. When I was in Jr. High we were told that the world would run out of natural gas in 1982. Either we were lied to or their theory just had some holes. I see many of these new Obama voters as conservatives of the future, just give them time to experience a few of life's real-world experiences.

This center is really for pushing an agenda of government control of liberalism (ie "progress)

The radical left fights back with money and research. They now have their perfect spokesperson and wolf in sheeps clothing. My fellow Jews have for centuries knew that education, research and knowledge will ultimately win the day. Probably that is why we lasted for millenium despite dozens of outside attempts at being conquered and wiped out. I am proud of this. Unfortunately their are too many of us enamored with ideas, ideals that are counter to my beliefs. Soros is another Marx, Alinsky and all the rest who just love Obamanism. BO is one of them. Time will tell how much he can get away with.

Perhaps Palin can become a conduit for countering this radical threat but she is NOT intellectual enough to go up against this.

I don't know who is other then Newt at this time - David Horowitz and others do exist. They are out there somewhere. Joe the Plumber is nice but he won't work against this sort of thing. This is a battle of ideals more akin to 1930's Europe IMHO. What I havent quite figured out it how can Soros, a product of the holocaust be more on the side of the philosophy that is closer to Socialism. Somehow Conservatism and the Republican party have become more alinged with Nazism, Marism? I don't get how Soros thinks more and big pushy goernment is not like what created WW2? Newt, could you explain this to me? Anyone here have enough historical knowledge?

****Bloomberg TV Bloomberg Radio Bloomberg Podcasts Bloomberg Press

Soros-Funded Democratic Idea Factory Becomes Obama Policy Font

By Edwin Chen

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Three blocks from the White House, on the 10th floor of a sleek glass building, young workers pound at computers, with giant flat-screen TVs overhead. It has the look and feel of a high-tech startup.

In many ways it is. The product is ideas.

Thanks in part to funding from benefactors such as billionaire George Soros, the Center for American Progress has become in just five years an intellectual wellspring for Democratic policy proposals, including many that are shaping the agenda of the new Obama administration.

Much as the Heritage Foundation provided intellectual heft for the Republican Party in the 1980s, CAP has been an incubator for liberal thought and helped build the platform that triumphed in the 2008 campaign.

``What CAP has done is recapture the role of ideas as an important political force, something the Republicans had been better at for 25 years,'' said Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, a non-partisan policy-research organization in Washington.

CAP's president and founder, John Podesta, 59, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, is one of three people running the transition team for president-elect Barack Obama, 47. A squadron of CAP experts is working with them.

Some of the group's recommendations already have been adopted by the president-elect.

Withdrawal of Troops

These include the center's call for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and a buildup of forces in Afghanistan, a plan for universal health coverage through employer plans and proposals to create purchasing pools that allow small businesses to spread the cost among a larger group of workers. Obama has endorsed much of a CAP plan to create ``green jobs'' linked to alleviating global climate change.

CAP also is advocating the creation of a ``National Energy Council'' headed by an official with the stature of the national security adviser and who would be charged with ``transforming the energy base'' of the U.S. In addition, CAP urges the creation of a White House ``office of social entrepreneurship'' to spur new ideas for addressing social problems.

To help promote its ideas, CAP employs 11 full-time bloggers who contribute to two Web sites, ThinkProgress and the Wonk Room; others prepare daily feeds for radio stations. The center's policy briefings are standing-room only, packed with lobbyists, advocacy-group representatives and reporters looking for insights on where the Obama administration is headed.

`Premier Progressive'

``The center is the premier progressive think tank in Washington,'' said Mark Green, head of the New Democracy Project, an urban-affairs institute in New York.

Just eight days after the Nov. 4 election, CAP released a 300,000-word volume called ``Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President'' that offers advice on issues such as economic revival and fixing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Work on the book began almost a year ago.

CAP, which has 180 staffers and a $27 million budget, devotes as much as half of its resources to promoting its ideas through blogs, events, publications and media outreach.

The center's future was far from certain in 2003, when wealthy donors such as Soros and film producer Stephen Bing gave $10 million or more to fill what they believed was an intellectual void in the Democratic Party and create a vehicle to produce an agenda for the party's eventual return to power.

Heritage Foundation

Podesta modeled the center on the Heritage Foundation, which became the go-to policy-research organization in 1981 when newly elected President Ronald Reagan embraced its conservative ideas embodied in a book called ``Mandate for Leadership.'' Heritage was just seven years old.

CAP and Heritage have something else in common.

``Others strive to be objective, we don't,'' said Jennifer Palmieri, CAP's vice president for communications.

Podesta likes to say, ``we're not a think tank, we're an action tank,'' said Dan Weiss, an environmental activist who joined CAP last year.

CAP isn't the only Democratic-leaning research organization in Washington with enhanced cachet after Obama's election.

The 92-year-old Brookings Institution, for example, has advisers in Obama's inner circle, including economist Jason Furman and foreign-policy expert Susan Rice. Others are working either part-time or full-time in the Obama transition.

Podesta's center isn't even among the biggest or best- funded. Brookings has a staff of more than 400 and an annual budget of $48 million. Heritage has a staff of 200 and a budget of $60 million. The American Enterprise Institute, which has close ties to the administration of President George W. Bush, has about 140 staffers, including Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and a budget of $28 million.

Influence

Yet CAP may be the most influential. In addition to Podesta, at least 10 other CAP experts are advising the incoming administration, including Melody Barnes, the center's executive vice president for policy who co-chairs the agency-review working group and Cassandra Butts, the senior vice president for domestic policy, who is now a senior transition staffer.

``John understood that ideas have power in this town, and he brought in super-bright people whose ideas have become essential reading,'' Isaacson said.

CAP's successes offer a lesson for Republican-leaning groups, said James McGann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who tracks policy groups.

``They've shown that one has to constantly innovate and be responsible to an ever-changing demographics and electorate, and have policies that are responsive to that,'' McGann said.

Actually, appearances to the contrary, it IS a serious answer. I've misplaced my copy of the book "Liberal Fascism" and so cannot even give you the author's name.

That said, if you go back to the intellectual origins of Mussolini and Hitler's National SOCIALISM, you will see that fascism is a LEFT WING ideology, not right wing. If you go back you will see that FDR's New Deal, which BO seeks to emulate and dramatically expand, was essentially FDR's take on what Mussolini was doing.

Although American Fascism, a.k.a. Liberalism, usually lacks the overtly violent tactics of Mussolini's Brown Shirts, its economic and social concepts and its goals are those of fascism.

***That said, if you go back to the intellectual origins of Mussolini and Hitler's National SOCIALISM, you will see that fascism is a LEFT WING ideology, not right wing. If you go back you will see that FDR's New Deal, which BO seeks to emulate and dramatically expand, was essentially FDR's take on what Mussolini was doing.

Although American Fascism, a.k.a. Liberalism, usually lacks the overtly violent tactics of Mussolini's Brown Shirts, its economic and social concepts and its goals are those of fascism***

Yes Crafty. You stated in a better way exactly what I was thinking. Somehow this nut job BO compares the US with "starting to appear uncomfortably close to Nazi Germany!". This is what he said. This guy is a nut job. It is exactly the *opposite* which is true!

They twisted around US conservatism to represent Naziism. In fact Conservativsim is freedom and the liberal agenda is closer to Nazism with its increasing and expanding government control over all of us.

Number 1) We do not have the spokes people, the MSM, around who will straigten this out in a way that appeals to most people IMO.

Number 2) Additionally as Rove says Republicans need to address real time issues in real time ways that ordinary people talk about at the table. Slogans about freedom, liberty, less government alone are not enough IMO. How can this be relayed in a way that appeals to ordinary Americans and in a way that address our modern problems? I don't know.

Hannity and Limbaugh do the first part in a crude way. They have NO clue about the second at all IMO.

Other names for Liberal Fascism are Corporatism (running society as if it were one giant corporation) and Crony Capitalism:

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Crony Capitalism, Predatory Politicians, and the Detroit Three by Newt Gingrich

There’s a term that’s commonly applied to the economic systems of some Asian and Latin American countries. It’s “crony capitalism.”

Crony capitalism is when government controls significant parts of the economy. Under this kind of bureaucratic micromanagement, politicians -- not the free market -- call the shots. And that means that the decisions that control the economy are of necessity political decisions, not economic ones.

Crony capitalism is bad for government. Economic power in the hands of politicians breeds corruption. Crony capitalism is bad for democracy. Individuals and businesses outside favored industries have an unequal voice in self-government. Crony capitalism is bad for business. Politicians wedded to the status quo stifle growth and innovation. And there’s one more thing about crony capitalism: It’s come to America.

It’s the nature of crony capitalism to expand -- for government to acquire more and more of the economy. The agents of this expansion are elected officials. Call them “predatory politicians.”

Crony capitalism practiced by predatory politicians is at the root of the current financial meltdown. In exchange for campaign cash and support for favored constituents, predatory politicians aided and abetted the government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they created and fed the subprime mortgage market. Now Predatory Politicians Are About to Make It Worse

And to fix the mess they created, what have predatory politicians turned to? Why, more crony capitalism of course.

First, they designed Wall Street bailouts in which a former chairman of Goldman Sachs got a blank check to disburse hundreds of billions of dollars to his former colleagues on Wall Street. Then they took over an insurance company at a hugely inflated cost. Now predatory politicians want taxpayers to fund a bailout of three bloated, stagnant companies that have been losing money for years, one of which is currently hemorrhaging over $1 billion a month.

The Detroit Three: An Investment Only a Predatory Politician Would Propose

To reward the unions that helped produce its electoral victory, the newly empowered Democratic Congress is proposing that American taxpayers pony up $25 billion to bail out the Detroit Three automakers, Ford, GM and Chrysler. Democrats are using the current financial crisis as their excuse to bailout the autos. But in fact, the Detroit three were unprofitable long before the current crisis hit. According to one economist, GM and Ford made more money-losing investments in the 1980s than any other U.S. companies. And the Detroit money pit only got deeper in the ensuing two decades. Since 1998, GM has been losing an astonishing $1.5 billion a month.

That’s an investment only a predatory politician would propose.

Bringing Fannie and Freddie Style Accountability to the Auto Industry

One of the things that makes crony capitalism so profitable for politicians is that Washington exempts itself from the economic and financial rules it imposes on private industry. For example, in 2003, federal regulators discovered that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had engaged in Enron-style accounting fraud. But while executives at private companies who engaged in similar fraud went to prison -- and Congress responded by imposing the draconian and business-killing Sarbanes-Oxley bill on private businesses -- Fannie and Freddie executives barely received a slap on the wrist.

One of the reasons was House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.). Frank fought tenaciously against the regulation that would have held Fannie and Freddie executives accountable and might have averted the financial crisis. Now Chairman Frank wants to bring his particular style of crony capitalism to the auto industry.

Any Detroit Bailout Government Board Should Be Subject To Sarbanes-Oxley

On “Face the Nation” this Sunday, Chairman Frank announced that not only would he push for a taxpayer bailout of the Detroit Three during the special session of Congress this week, but he would also create a government oversight board for the three companies -- in effect, a board of directors made up of predatory politicians.

I believe that it would be a mistake for the taxpayers to be forced to bail out Detroit. Companies at which union workers make $71 an hour in wages and benefits -- compared to just $47 an hour at Toyota’s U.S. plants -- are not going to be saved by a $25 billion government check.

But if Democrats do find the votes to bring crony capitalism to Detroit, Americans should at the very least insist that any government board of directors created for the auto industry be subject to the criminal penalties and lengthy prison sentences in Sarbanes-Oxley.

What’s fair for the rest of us is fair for predatory politicians.

A Chance For President-Elect Obama to Deliver Real Change

The solution to our economic problems, be they in Detroit or on Wall Street, isn’t more crony capitalism; it’s economic growth.

While politicians in Washington are constantly calling on taxpayers to put up more and more money to bail out flagging businesses, there are practical things that wouldn't cost the taxpayers a penny that we could do to make America a better place to create jobs.

One of these things is to repeal Sarbanes-Oxley. As I outline in more detail here, Sarbanes-Oxley has had the unintended consequences of stifling innovation, killing new business start-ups and driving listings overseas.

President-elect Obama won an historic victory two weeks ago on the promise of delivering change to the American people. Bailing out the Detroit auto dinosaurs is not change. It is crony capitalism in service of a failed status quo.

President-elect Obama should stand up to congressional Democrats and say “no” -- “no” to saddling future generations of Americans with the bill for today’s crony capitalism.

From what other Republican [than Newt] do we hear such a logical discussion of the problem from the viewpoint of the right?Wwhat Newt says certainly sounds logical. And it certainly makes me wonder how Frank could still be in the House and in a position to attempt to fix the problems.I guess we need a "Republican Soros" to fund a front organization at Frank's district and make his constituants more aware of what a corrupt official he is.